A typical call center includes a number of agents (also referred to herein as representatives) who field inbound telephone calls and place outbound telephone calls. Call center telephone calls frequently have associated data, such as customer information and the details of customer requests. An agent may place outbound sales calls or receive inbound calls (such as 800 telephone numbers) from potential customers.
A conventional call center typically comprises either an Automatic Call Distributor (ACD) or Private Branch Exchange (PBX) apparatus which receives incoming calls through a Public Switched Telephone Network (PSTN) and routes the calls to a group of ACD agents having like skills. Specialized telephones, known as ACD/PBX feature phones, interface with a specific manufacturer's ACD/PBX and provide the agents with an array of advanced telephony functions.
Lately, call center agents increasingly interact with customers via online chats and emails in addition to telephone calls. It is not unusual for call center agents to be filling out application forms or taking down relevant information (also referred to herein as relevant elements) as a result of interacting with customers via telephone calls, online chats, or emails.
The conventional method of filling out application forms while interacting with customers via telephone calls, online chats or emails takes time and slows down the process. In order to write down the information a customer provides, a call center agent has to ask the caller to pause while typing. This not only increases the time agents have to spend on the phone, it also makes the calling experience less pleasant.
On the other hand, there exist commercial products that perform speech recognition and dialog management for customers to interact with a machine using a natural communication medium, namely speech. However, current commercial systems have limitations. The callers have to know the system. They cannot say anything they want and have the system understand their needs. Also, the commercial product does not provide a free dialog user interface, and the users are directed by the system as to what they can say at a particular state in the dialog. The responses are modeled by context-free grammars (CFGs) and hence the responses have to be in a specific format. Thus, fully automatic customer service telephone system has its own drawbacks. Customers are often frustrated while going through an automatic response system's seemingly endless options or when the automatic response system fails to recognize the customers' responses.
Cruickshank, in U.S. Pat. No. 6,816,468, describes a teleconferencing system, including apparatus and methods, for providing transcription and/or translation services during a teleconference. The disclosed teleconferencing system establishes a voice connection and a data connection with participants to the teleconference desiring transcription services. The speech of each participant to the teleconference is transcribed using voice recognition technology in real or near-real time. Additionally, the transcribed text may be translated into a participant's desired language. The translation may be generated in real or near-real time on a word-by-word basis or alternatively, on a phrase-by-phrase or sentence-by-sentence basis. The translated and transcribed text is displayed for a participant using the established data connection. The transcribed (and possibly translated) text may be displayed in real or near-real time during a participant's speech. Audio translation services are also provided to a participant using text-to-speech software to generate an audio signal from the translated and transcribed text.
Mitchell et al., in U.S. Pat. No. 6,961,700, describes a data processing apparatus for receiving recognition data from a speech recognition engine and its corresponding dictated audio data where the recognition data includes recognized words or characters. A display displays the recognized words or characters and the recognized words or characters are stored as a file together with the corresponding audio data. The recognized words or characters can be processed and link data is formed to link the position of the words or characters in the file and the position of the corresponding audio component in the audio data.
He et al., in U.S. Pat. No. 7,236,931, describes a system and method for automatic acoustic speaker adaptation in an automatic speech recognition assisted transcription system. Partial transcripts of audio files are generated by a transcriptionist. A topic language model is generated from the partial transcripts. The topic language model is interpolated with a general language model. Automatic speech recognition is performed on the audio files by a speech recognition engine using a speaker independent acoustic model and the interpolated language model to generate semi-literal transcripts of the audio files. The semi-literal transcripts are then used with the corresponding audio files to generate a speaker dependent acoustic model in an acoustic adaptation engine.
Cyr et al., in U.S. Pat. No. 7,146,321, describes a distributed speech recognition system which includes a speech processor linked to a plurality of speech recognition engines. The speech processor includes an input for receiving speech files from a plurality of users and storage means for storing the received speech files until such a time that they are forwarded to a selected speech recognition engine for processing. The speech processor further includes a dispatch system linked to the storage means for controlling the transmission of speech files to the plurality of speech recognition engines in a controlled manner.
Denton et al., in U.S. Pat. No. 7,295,669, describes a method and system for transferring telephone calls and data between computer programs in a call center. Flow connection modules associated with call center application programs allow data and telephone calls to be transferred from one computer program to another in the call center. The flow connection modules may be combined with a locator program such that the combination replaces the automatic call distributor (ACD) in a call center. The flow connection modules enable development of modular call centers, allowing the number of call center agent workstations to be easily increased or decreased. In operation, an application notifies its flow connection module that a call on a telephone in the workstation should be transferred to another application. The flow connection module establishes a data connection with a flow connection module associated with the other application.
Lent et al., in U.S. Pat. No. 6,718,313, describes a system and method for providing on line chat help to an applicant. An application identifier and a chat applet are inserted into a web page. The web page is sent to the applicant. The chat applet is configured to determine, based on an event, that the applicant could benefit from online chat and, upon such determination, to send a request to a chat server for a connection and to include the application identifier with the request.
Coden et al., in U.S. Pat. No. 6,816,858 B1, describes a system and method for performing Automatic Stream Analysis for Broadcast Information which takes speech audio as input, converts the audio stream into text using a speech recognition system, applies a variety of analyzers to the text stream to identify information elements, automatically generates queries from these information elements, and extracts data from search results that is relevant to a current program. The data is multiplexed into the broadcast signal and transmitted along with the original audio/video program. The system is fully automatic and operates in real time, allowing broadcasters to add relevant collateral information to live programming.
Metz, in Creating a Natural Language Call Router, IBM developer Works, Feb. 15, 2005, describes natural language call routers letting callers state in plain language their problems and be routed to the proper destination quickly and reliably. To accomplish call routing, two statistical models are created. The first performs speech recognition and is called a Statistical Language Model (SLM). The SLM tunes the speech recognition engines to the particular things the callers will say. By creating customized SLM based on what the callers are likely to say, the accuracy can be high without the typical lengthy per-user enrollment process that is typical of desktop dictation systems. The second model that needs to be created is called the Action Classifier (AC) model. The AC model takes the spoken request obtained by the speech engines and predicts the correct action to take. Actions are the categories into which each request a caller makes can be sorted. The two models are deployed inside a call routing application, a Web project preconfigured to use the call routing models. The two models figure out what a caller wants to do, and the call routing application defines where to route the caller for each action. Typically, each action routes to an extension in an organization's call center or an Interactive Voice Response (IVR) software program.
Automatic speech recognition has been a research area for 30 years. Significant improvements have been made in computational speeds and speech recognition technology to make it an interesting area of business as well. The main goal in speech recognition is to have a machine recognize what word is being spoken by an arbitrary person. Applications range from desktop dictation, various telephony applications, such as voice portals, directory dialers to embedded speech recognition applications, such as command and control in a car. Initially, studies were done on limited vocabulary isolated speech recognition. However, recently large vocabulary continuous speech recognition systems have been developed and are being made commercially available by several companies.
Despite these developments, customers still have to either interact with an automatic response unit which does not always understand what the customers are saying, or wait in line to talk to an agent and wait for the agent to manually record relevant information the customers provide.
Thus, there is a need for improved methods and systems that address the above problems, as well as others.